Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Moses: The Lawgiver and the Law

Rembrandt painting of Moses breaking the tablets

What comes to mind when we think of Moses? Apart from Charlton Heston, an abandoned child in a basket, the Ten Plagues, the parting of the sea, his most important legacy has been undoubtedly the apparition of the fundamentally influential Ten Commandments.

It is astonishing how important Law with a Capital L has been – and how necessary. Moses was gone just for a short while, and when he came back he could not believe his eyes – the people he had liberated were involved in an orgy, drinking and adoring a giant golden calf. These guys absolutely need some guidance, he must have thought. And in his fury he actually broke the tablet of commandments given to him by God Himself.

The Ten Commandments have always struck me as authoritarian. Rules one has to obey and if not, the wrath of the jealous God, so feared and so abundant during the Old Testament, would come down on each and every one up to the third and fourth generation. They resemble a father who tells his child how to behave, but gives no underlying reason for it (which is in modern terms not the best kind of parenthood ... yet Jesus would later have a different approach on the whole issue.)

Let me give examples. Thou shalt not kill. Nothing more true than that, at least from our modern perspective. We have gone through centuries and centuries of ethical and moral analysis and development, and the individual life, including human rights, has come to be valued.

Back in those times the perspective was essentially different, and not until the Renaissance and afterwards did the concept of individuality actually exist. The reason people did not kill each other was not because they valued the other's existential rights; it was because they were aware of the consequences.

If I kill so-and-so, this clan, tribe, family will get upset and will in turn demand either my life or seek to do harm to somebody from my group to get even. It is the old adage of “eye for an eye.” Yet as Mahatma Gandhi states wonderfully that with this method the whole world could go blind, killing each other would eventually lead to the destruction of humankind.

Hobbes claimed that humans are essentially brutes who look for their own advantage and that if left without government, or laws, then looting, murder, and a state of constant chaos would exist. But with laws and punitive consequences for one's actions, the citizens will be forced to obey the law, which was intended for the common good.

Now in the case of the Commandments, they may not have offered reasons why killing someone or coveting the neighbor's wife and possessions are bad simply because people in those times may not have had the faculties to understand the underlying reasons. What worked best for them there and then were strict rules that ought to be followed. No questions asked. End of discussion.

And if one did not obey, one would draw the wrath of God and perhaps even spend a whole eternity of suffering in burning hell. Now that's a high price to pay for not obeying.

6 comments:

Jack Payne said...

I always firmly believed in the Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, But, I always thought, Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife, had something to say for it, from the opposite side--at times, and under very special circumstances. Oh, well, guess I'm not the final word on Bible stories. I still think of Moses as Charlton Heston.

okaonis said...

not only that, all the Hebrews who actually left Egypt never entered Canaan except for Joshua and Caleb. Because of their disobedience, they've been wandering in the desert for 40 years when their ancestor Jacob crossed it in only 3 days.

Anonymous said...

I guess the concepts were so new that Moses didn't bother with explaining why killing is bad. Even many centuries after Moses when Jesus actually tried to explain and move ethics to a whole new level of love your neighbor as you love yourself the supposedly civilized Jewish and Roman societies were still savages stoning people to death or crucifying them for dubious crimes. It all makes more sense now though.

Deanna Lack said...

Nice post. Have to say, burning in hell for eternity as a consequence of one moment of rage, or even a lifetime of bad deeds, is not just and doesn't even fit the eye for eye criteria. God is love?

Alex Great said...

simply said:
Remember while you covet neighbor,s ass that your ass is in the line :)

new illuminati said...

There were actually 613 commandments dispensed by the lawgiver - who had been an educated noble in the Egyptian court, after all.
Hellfire and brimstone didn't mean the same thing to the Hebrews - they were an invention of other regional lies, promulgated to a fever pitch by the Cathoholics.
The childhood tales are Babylonian borrowings from the tales of earlier prophets, but later 'miracles' are best interpreted via the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky.

See http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

and

http://enlightenment.today.com